On 2026-10-31 ace's route-proxy said only that the vault could not be asked, and ace said nothing for five minutes
while a pass waited after the vault restarted; the retry that already existed was invisible. A refusal for a seat or
a read that did not answer now says when the node composes again ("the node composes again at HH:MM:SS (try N)"), a
retry pass says it starts, a pass that runs on says every minute what it waits on, and the node-engine's verb
compose makes a pass now and says how it went, so a person recovers without a restart.
Four providers waited for a yes on 2026-10-31 and nobody could read what waited: the have said only
"where its data is kept". The read verb composition answers it from the engine: the latest revision of the
want's build or the one asked by digest, every revision the bucket keeps, what runs and where that is known from,
the want and the have, the move's judgement and whether it waits for a yes, and with diff the resources that
differ, a received file naming its consumers. revisionNamed now reads the same revisions.
Every engine's node-seat subscriptions were refused at 12:10 by a user list composed without them. nats
asks a refused subscription again only on a new connection, and a user-list reload makes none, so the
seat answered nobody all afternoon and the messenger held every Telegram ask. The endpoints also lacked
the kind and scope discovery reads, so the console said nothing in the mesh is called node-engine.
Quick fix: restart the engines. Thorough fix (chosen, the second time a stale user list left an engine
deaf): a refused subscription of any kind is said and the link is opened again after a pause (1 min,
doubling to 30 min), so every subscription the engine makes is asked again; the seat's endpoints carry
kind, seat, scope, module, description and schema like every tool runner's.
mesh/merge-gate pass: builds mesh-host → ace, g14, novox, shanks; no bus step; every machine composes with the change as it did without (4 of 4 compose)
Two holes the review proved. The ask's subject proved nothing — a responder can reach it through a reply — so the engine now verifies the mesh's signature over a fixed context with the key it verifies declarations with, before reading anything, and refuses an ask for another node, expired, good too long, without a nonce, or replayed. And the apply followed a link the hand-over had refused: a component swapped for a link after the record carried root's chmod and chown to its target. A handed-over directory must now still resolve to itself, and is changed only through one descriptor opened from / with no link followed (fchmod, fchown). Tests for the reply guard, the run loop's hook, the fallback renewal on proof and a non-regular fallback; 27 checks each removed in turn, each failing a test.
mesh/merge-gate pass: builds mesh-host → ace, g14, novox, shanks; no bus step; every machine composes with the change as it did without (4 of 4 compose)
The file on PATH was the engine a person copied at installation, and every delivered engine ran from the versions directory: the operator typed hand-over and a build from before it answered "unexpected argument". A proved engine now copies itself over that file when the bytes differ (never a link). And the hand-over of a directory used as found (issue 339) gets its channel: the controller's terminal asks this node's engine on mesh.node.<node>.ask.hand-over; the engine judges every value — the ask's size and shape, who asked, the path as it states it, a directory and no link, through no link — and records it or refuses and records nothing. Every text the engine addresses to the operator names the nox line (ADR 0272); the engine's own subcommands are install-time and rescue, and its usage says so.
jschoubben
jochen